m twenty miles an hour.

The "voyage alone" had culminated at Cowes when the splendid exhibition
of fireworks closed the grand show of British yachting. It was a
beautiful sight those whizzing rockets speeding from wave to sky, and
scattering bright gems above to fall softly from the black heaven; those
glares of red or green that painted all the wide crescent of beauteous
hulls, and dim, tall masts with a glow of ardent colour, and the
"bouquets" of fantastic form and hue, with noise that rattled aloft,
while thousands of paled faces cheered loud below. To this day the deck
of the Rob Roy (which is now in Australia) bears marks of the fire-shower
falling quietly, gently down, but still with a red scar burned in black
at the last.

Luggage is all on board again, and our tiny "Blue Peter" flies at the
fore, for the Rob Roy will weigh anchor now for her homeward voyage. The
Ryde Regatta was well worth seeing, and she stopped there in an uneasy
night, but we need not copy the log of another set of sailing matches.

Thus in a fine evening, when the sun sank ruddy and the breeze blew soft,
we turned again to Brading harbour, and, just perhaps because we had come
safely once before, there was listless incaution now, as if Bembridge
reef could not be cruel on such a fine evening as this.

Various and doubtless most true directions had been given to me as to
entering this narrow channel:--"Keep the tree in a line with the
monument; that's your mark." But when you come there and see the
monument, there are twenty trees; and which then is _the_ tree to guide
by? Here, therefore, and in mundane things on land too it is alike, the
misapprehension of a rule was worse than the chance mistake of undirected
mother-wit. A horrid crash brought us suddenly to rest; the Rob Roy had
struck on a rock. Though I was lax at the time, and lolling and lazy,
yet presence of mind remained. Down came the sails, out leaped the
anchor, and shoving, and hauling, and rowing did their best; but no, she
was firmly berthed on one of the north-west rocks. Presently a malicious
wave lifted her stern round and the rudder soon bumped on another sharp
ledge, until by sounding and patience I at last got her free, and rowed
out through a channel unconscionably narrow, and then ran the sails up,
and the yawl was safe again, sailing smoothly, with a deep sigh of
deliverance.

A sailing-boat had put off from the shore to help, seeing the
catastrophe, b